Excessive alcohol consumption is common among college students, and as a result, it exposes young adults to a wide range of health problems, from cardiovascular disease to cancer. Day after day, students are bombarded with drinking clues, whether it’s seeing a group of friends toast at a party or celebrating after an exam.
Using functional MRI (fMRI) imaging technology, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University and Dartmouth College examined the relationship between these signals, the craving for alcohol and Alcohol consumption. They found that having a strong sense of purpose in life decreases the temptation to drink to excess in some social drinkers.
Why a goal in life?
Lead author Yoona Kang, research director of the Communication Neuroscience Lab at Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication, has a deep interest in the impact of life purpose on health.
Her previous research has found that having a strong life purpose—feeling that your life is guided by personally meaningful values and goals—is associated with numerous health benefits, including alleviating loneliness. COVID-19 isolation and reduction of effort required. make healthy choices.
“Values and goals can have powerful effects on how people think and behave,” says Kang. “And what’s interesting about this study is that we asked participants, ‘What sense of purpose in life do you feel right now?’ Because your goal level can fluctuate from day to day. »
craving for alcohol
For this study, Kang and his colleagues mapped the behavior and attitudes of 54 healthy college students with daily surveys over the course of a month. Once a day, participants answered questions about their current level of purpose in life – and each morning and evening they reported how much alcohol they crave and consumed.
“We focused on craving because it is one of the strongest predictors of actual alcohol consumption. If you feel like it, you’re more likely to drink,” says Kang. “But just because you crave booze doesn’t mean you’re going to go out and drink, so we wanted to know what drives these social drinkers to drink when they crave booze. »
The student volunteers also received fMRI brain scans, which gave a real-time picture of their brain activity when exposed to alcohol cues, such as photos of beer, wine and liquor or photos of people toasting at a party. The researchers analyzed the participants’ brain activity in the ventral striatum, the area of the brain previously associated with reward and desire.
People whose brains showed greater activity when they saw alcohol cues — people with higher neural reactivity to alcohol cues — were more likely to drink after craving alcohol.
When this data was matched with data on life purpose, Kang and his colleagues found something interesting: These neural-sensitive drinkers did not necessarily drink more if they felt a strong purpose in life. when they wanted alcohol. What if they felt less determined? They were more likely to drink heavily after a craving for alcohol.
Additional consequences
This discovery opens the door to discovering new strategies to discourage excessive alcohol consumption in college students, especially those with higher reactivity to neural signals, not by specifically talking about alcohol consumption, but by helping students focus on their mission, purpose and values. Kang suggests that future research could test interventions used for other purposes in life and related studies — strategies such as thinking about what matters to you or making positive wishes for other people.
While the researchers caution that further testing would be needed to determine whether the findings would generalize to non-academic populations, they note that numerous studies point to the strong link between life purpose and health behavior in various populations.
And Kang stresses the importance of studying university populations. “Students are in a formative period of their lives where they learn norms around drinking and establish their own habits that will affect their health later in life,” she says. “So I think there’s a lot of preventative value in studying alcohol use in college populations. »
The research was funded by the Army Research Office; Hopelab Foundation; and the Mind and Life Institute.